Textile Dimensions

Saturday, 15 December 2012

Saturday, 24 March 2012

Weave Designing Using Spread sheet (Excel)

Representing fabric weave design on paper has always required a grid paper or as we call it graph paper. This graph paper has enabled us to represent the columns as warps of fabric and row as wefts of fabric. And we can mark the interaction of each corresponding warp and weft by marking with specific symbols or colours.

Almost similar
functionality can be achieved on any spread sheet software like Microsoft Excel
or any other similar software. In fact
the functionality can further be increased to use automation to do routine
job. That may include:

Easily making numerous colour
and weave effect designs for given weaves and colour pattern

Interconverting spread sheet
cell colours to image pixels

Printing Jacquard Card punching
details

Printing Peg plan for Peg or
Paper Dobby

Off course to do
these all and other function out of excel requires expertise and patience.

Excel as Weave Design Graph Paper:

So let’s get
start weave designing with Excel. So first thing first, we need to build a
spread-sheet that can be used as a graph paper.

We will need following steps to make excel sheet
be behaving as weave design graph sheet:

Resize the Cells:

We need to resize all cells to be square in shape and ready to take
only single alphabet as input to show up and down of the fabric. Usually all
cell of 20 pixel width and height is good to work with.

For this you can select all cells by using the short cut key “Ctrl +
A” and change any column’s width and any rows height to 20 pixels rest of the
cells will change automatically.

2.Make Cells show Colours:

For each cell to re-colour itself, we need to use the conditional
formatting available in Microsoft Excel. Conditional formatting changes the
appearance of a cell on bases of what its contents are. For the ease of entry I
usually prefer to have Red, Blue, Green, Black and White colour’s cell by
placing z, x, c, v, and b respectively in any cell. It gives ease of entering
the text by left hand and with right hand you can easily place the cursor or
control the mouse. Usually left hand index finger is on “v” or on “b” to have
Black and White colour cells. And for other colours we can use:

1.z à Red

2.x à Green

3.c à Blue

4.v à Black

5.b à White

For conditional formatting to be applied on whole of the sheet you
need to do following steps in order:

¨Select all the sheet or cell
where you want to apply these settings. (I prefer it to apply to the whole
sheet).

¨Select the conditional
formatting from “Home” Tab on ribbon interface of Excel 2007 or 2010. And click
on “Manage Rules”.

¨Next you need to define the rules,
click the “New Rule in the “Conditional Formatting Rules Manager” Dialog box.

¨Click "OK" twice and now you have
your first Rule for "z" is set to red color. Do same for other
inputs.

¨Like shown.

So
know we have the sheet that can take input of z, x, c, v and b to input colour
in cells, like this:

One
more thing; make setting of each cell so that contents of the cell do not
change the cell width, for that select all sheet by pressing “Ctrl + A” from
your keyboard and left click anywhere in the sheet on any cell and select
“Format Cells”:

Format
Cell dialog box opens; tick the “shrink to fit” check box option, to resize the
font size for content of the cell to fit in.

3.Make it a Template File:

So what’s next, should we be doing this for every time we start
Excel for weave designing? No, let’s make an Excel template file so that every
time we need the weave design graph sheet we can use this template to have this
setting already done.